The news that Ian Hunter just turned 84 reminded me of one of my fave facty surprises when doing S+A, which is learning that when the Mottman became a pop star he was already in his early thirties, with a wife and two kids.
Ian Hunter, in fact, was born so long ago that he's older than my mother.
More relevantly, he's older than both Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, the two primary sources for Hunter and the Hoople's style. (That seems a bit undignified somehow - like a prefect copying a fourth former).
"All the Young Dudes", the song that he and they are most remembered for, was received at the time as the Third Generation Anthem. The "third generation" was a concept coined by Alice Cooper, or at least most prominently promoted by him in interviews. The idea was that the First Generation was the kids whose lives were shaken by rock 'n' roll when it first erupted in the late 1950s; the Second Generation was the Beatles and the Stones cohort; but now here we were, in 1971-72, with a whole fresh wave of youngsters who wanted their own bands to follow, their own idols, their own sound. Hence the lyric, written by David Bowie of course, with its jeering reference to older siblings still stuck on stale Sixties sounds and ideals: "And my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones / We never got it off on that revolution stuff".
The irony of Ian Hunter, born in June 1939, before the Second World War, singing these lines should be fairly obvious. He would have been just the right age, at 17, 18, to have been one of the First Generation Brit rock'n'roll singers alongside Cliff Richard and Billy Fury (both slightly his juniors). When the beat group boom kicked off in England around 1964, Hunter would have been on the older side already but could have joined in the Second Generation action. To be the mouthpiece of Third Generation consciousness at the ripe age of 33 is pushing it.
Mind you, one of the peculiar things about glam 'n' glitter is that while it was the teenage sensation of the nation, rather a lot of its prime movers were old lags who'd been trying to have a hit for ages. Gary Glitter had been a touted potential teenybop idol before The Beatles; Alvin Stardust, likewise, had been the roadie of Brit rock'n'rollers Shane Fenton and the Fentones and then was drafted as replacement for the suddenly-dead singer, even taking on the name Shane Fenton. Alice Cooper was no spring chicken (23 when he sang "I'm Eighteen", but still he was a good nine years younger than Ian Hunter). Even the relatively youthful Bowie and Bolan had been trying for ages to make it, donning and doffing styles and personae since the early-mid Sixties.
But out of that whole era of theatrical rockers, I think only Alex Harvey (born 1935) was more ancient than Ian H.
Incidentally, the First / Second / Third Generation concept that Cooper was pushing is out-of-whack with the commonly regarded "natural span" of a generation (20 to 30 years). If we give the idea credence, that would mean rock would be running through three whole "generations" in less than 20 years (1955 to 1972). These would seem to be more accurately termed micro-generations, not tied to the interval between childhood and having children yourself but more like the sensibility-gulf between wide-gap siblings. So the lyric about the brother still listening to the Beatles and Stones fits.
(Look out soon - possibly this very week - for my essay that explores the concept of "the generation", along with related notions like the decade etc.)
Alice Cooper's own Third Generation anthem, if we don't count "I'm Eighteen", was "Generation Landslide"
